The Ukrainian Duma and (Other) Slavic Epic of the 'Ottoman Ecumene'

• In Event: Empire, Identity, and Epic: Reimagining Poetry in the Slavic World

Abstract

In 1981 in Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Albert B. Lord published “Comparative Slavic Epic,” in which he proposed to “investigate a few facets of the relationship between South Slavic … oral traditional epic and that of the Eastern Slavs.” Here, across the Macedonian, Bosniak, Russian, and Ukrainian heroic narrative song traditions, Lord compares a single oral-traditional formula (of the hero’s horse), theme (of the saddling of this horse), and story-pattern (the Return Song). He takes a highly restricted view of epic, limiting it to the complete Return Song, which is all but exclusive to Bosniaks among the Slavic peoples of the “Ottoman ecumene”; largely on this basis, he argues that “most of the [Ukrainian] dumy” are not true epic songs, but “actually ballads.”

Lord’s constraints, followed by other American scholars of oral tradition, have precluded meaningful comparison, not only of the Ukrainian tradition with “the other three Slavic traditional epics” (which it is held not to resemble), but indeed between any tradition characterized as “balladic” (e.g., large parts of the Serbian) and the epic. On the basis of further comparative study of Bosniak and Serbian junačke pjesme and Ukrainian dumy—in particular, an analysis of variants of the “guest-host exchange” and “conversation with the hero”/“girls mock a hero” themes as well as the Return Song pattern—I demonstrate that the duma form is indeed epic, not balladic, and moreover that it participates richly in the Slavic oral tradition of the Ottoman Empire, to which the Zaporozhian Cossacks were, of course, adjacent.

Author

• Robert Romanchuk, Florida State U